PROUD AS A PEACOCK by Mary D. MacKinnon 
My Aunt Amanda was an old maid school teacher. She lived with her bachelor brother.
The first time I had been in their house was when I was barely two years old. I had stayed there with Aunt Amanda and her mother while my mother was in the hospital having my baby sister. When they discovered I had never been baptized, they called in their pastor who sprinkled me, and Aunt Amanda assumed the role of godmother to me. She took her promises of that role very seriously. Time travel seemed feasible when I stepped into Aunt Amanda's house. Everything there looked as it must have looked fifty or sixty years earlier. A musty smell hit me as soon as I stepped into the front hall. Lampshades all drooped with beaded fringes. The parlor was off limits except for special occasions. On those rare occasions I enjoyed playing chopsticks on the piano which was also a rarity, with swirls in the maple wood frame. The rest of the house was just as different. The kitchen had a faucet with running water, but also had a pump that pumped spring water for drinking. Just outside the backdoor was a spacious outhouse which had been made for a large family and had four seats, one child-sized. The one thing that never changed was how she smothered me with her big hug and escorted me through the house to the dining room for frosty lemonade in beautiful cut-glass tumblers. Unlike her situation, but just like the majority of people in the U.S. during the 1930s, my family was in the throes of the Depression.v Never enough money was our main problem. Our diet consisted of many dozens of eggs since dad could buy those for ten cents a dozen at the reformatory. Mother and I shared a winter coat for two years.v Christmas gifts were bought with the 25 cents mom had for each of us. For me the crowning touch that year was a pair of ice skates from Aunt Amanda which came in the mail. There was a large rink near our house and I skated every single night of that winter. My best friend, Louise, was the daughter of the richest man in town and our friendship flourished in spite of such unequal financial status.v Easter was coming up, the time when no one went to church without a new dress. Louise would have no problem. Her mother had bought her five new dresses on a recent shopping trip. I not only didn't have a new dress, my shoes had holes in the soles, shielded by cardboard slipped inside them. Then a package came from Aunt Amanda. Inside were new shoes and a soft gray wooly dress. On Easter Sunday, I walked about two miles through a soft snowfall to the sunrise service. No peacock was ever so proud of his raiment as I was of my new shoes and soft dress. I felt as Cinderella must have in her finery. A revelation flashed into my mind. Appearances can lie. My Aunt Amanda who had taken me under her wing was a prime example of that. The dumpy, over-plump, old maid school teacher image that she presented to the world masked the fact that in reality she was my very own Fairy Godmother. |
Source: Image Source: LilKiyttyGraphics
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